IBM had the money, the research, and a decade’s head start on everyone else. It still failed to become what the world now calls Anthropic or OpenAI.
In June 2017, eight Google researchers published a paper that became the foundation of every major AI model built since. IBM could have gone after that talent. It didn’t.
That same year, IBM committed $240 million to a new AI lab. Compare that number to what a real strategic response would have required.
Meanwhile, the numbers under Ginni Rometty tell their own story: 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline, and IBM was the only company among 17 major U.S. tech firms worth over $100 billion to lose market value during her tenure as CEO.
I also went through her acquisitions, and I didn’t go in looking to just tear them apart. Red Hat worked, and I say so. Watson Health cost IBM more than $4 billion and sold for a fraction of that. IBM literally paid a competitor to take its chip manufacturing business off its hands.
And I name the executive who should have had the CEO job years before he actually got it, and explain exactly why.
This is a governance case study as much as a technology one. Boards that wait for certainty before acting on a discontinuity are boards that lose the decade. IBM proves it.
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